My alphabet book at Duddingston Primary, Edinburgh, began traditionally with 'a is for apple,' but when it came to 'g,' it was 'g is for gas globe.' This was in the late Fifties; there hadn't been gas globes for decades. The textbook must have been 30 or 40 years old!

Gavin Esler

/images/quoteimage/ab-de-villiers-2292.jpg

I don't care about hundreds, fifties, averages.

Rock and roll's relatively new, in the sense of the Fifties, Sixties, right? They invented the first sort of rock stars, and they took it to excess, and then the excess became bitter, tormented. Then it became okay to succeed.

Albert Hammond, Jr.

Men Vent Tormented

William Maxwell's my favorite North American writer, I think. And an Irish writer who used to write for 'The New Yorker' called Maeve Brennan, and Mary Lavin, another Irish writer. There were a lot of writers that I found in 'The New Yorker' in the Fifties who wrote about the same type of material I did - about emotions and places.

Alice Munro

Yorker York Wrote

I think that wealthy white people would like to have a country that resembles the Fifties, when all the minorities were tucked away in ghettos and paid in very low wages but on the surface it was very bright and shiny and free and the rest of the world would look on it longingly.

Alice Walker

Age Would World

The riskiest thing I have done in my fifties is to do a Polish accent for a new film. I had a great time working on it and two wonderful people to guide me. A dialect coach that I have known for thirty years and a Polish actor.

Andie MacDowell

Work Time Great

It would have been so awesome to be born in the Thirties and be in your prime in the Fifties. Except for the whole being black thing, obviously!

Andra Day

Your You Would

My style was established in the Forties and Fifties, then got dragged through the decades and picked up a couple more things on the way.

Andra Day

Way Up Tie

Well, I actually grew up in the sixties. I feel very lucky, actually, that that was my slice of time that I was dealt. Let's remember that the real motivation in the sixties, and even in the fifties, was the Cold War.

Ann Druyan

War Time Well

In the fact that 'Vogue' is someone that can help guide enormous audiences through this fascinating world, I would like to think we are as influential and actually are now reaching so many more people than we ever dreamt of back in the Fifties or the Sixties.

Anna Wintour

Would World Vogue

When I was in my early twenties, parts would be written for women in their fifties, and I would get them. And now I'm in my early thirties, and I'm like, 'Why did that 24-year-old get that part?' I was that 24-year-old once. I can't be upset about it; it's the way things are.

Anne Hathaway

Women Men Art

Since the nineteen-fifties, rural Florida has marketed itself to Northerners and Midwesterners as an unexplored paradise of citrus and mermaids.

Anne Hull

Teen Westerner Western

Life is not quantifiable in terms of age, but I suppose in my fifties I am more grounded and more at ease in my own skin than when I was younger. I have a confidence that I didn't have before from the experiences I've had.

Annie Lennox

Life Experience Age

My father is Hungarian and moved to Britain during the uprising, and my Spanish mum comes from Galicia; they moved here at the end of the Fifties.

Anton du Beke

Up UN Tie

I grew up in the Fifties and Sixties and remember how unpleasant all kinds of food could be then.

Art Malik

Food Up Unpleasant

There are lesbians, God knows... if you came up through lesbian circles in the forties and fifties in New York... who were not feminist and would not call themselves feminists.

Audre Lorde

God You York

I knew that if I wrote a new book every six months or every year, if I continued to read great books, eventually I would write something worthy of publication. I understood I might be in my forties or my fifties or even my sixties, but I felt confident that it would happen.

Augusten Burroughs

Great Year Wrote

Early on in my career, I used to get out in the 30s, 40s, fifties, and 60s. So I really appreciated reaching my first hundred.

Babar Azam

Car Used Use

What happened in the late Fifties, early Sixties in French cinema was a fantastic revolution. I was in Italy, but completely in love with the nouvelle vague movement, and directors like Godard, Truffaut, Demy. 'The Dreamers' was a total homage to cinema and that love for it.

Bernardo Bertolucci

Men Love God

People don't remember that during the Fifties and Sixties there was a Cold War, and kids were getting under their desks during school because they thought they were going to get bombed. So it wasn't really that ideal at all.

Brian Fallon

War Were Use

'Doo-wop' is a very special word for me. Because I grew up listening to my dad who, as a Fifties rock & roll head, loved doo-wop music.

Bruno Mars

Music Love Word

In the Fifties, my parents were known as 'America's sweethearts'. Their pictures graced the covers of all the newspapers. They were the Brad Pitt and Jennifer Aniston of their day.

Carrie Fisher

I grew up in the Fifties, and the majority of people in my class had fathers living at home. I was very aware that I was in the minority. I had a foreign name, and my daddy didn't come and pick me up from school. I felt like an outsider, which probably helped me as an actress.

Cherie Lunghi

Cindy McCain has emerged as a definite hottie. I think that sometimes happens to women in their early fifties.

Christopher Buckley

In the Fifties, there were certain places we couldn't ride on the bus, and now there is a possibility of a black man being in the White House. You have to feel good about it.

Chuck Berry

You know, women have a history of just being - we've been told all our lives not to say - in the fifties you couldn't say birth or even be pregnant hardly on television - and then gradually things have changed.

Cybill Shepherd

Generally, older people in their fifties, sixties, and seventies are running most countries and are CEOs of corporations. Which isn't to say there aren't entrepreneurs, but if the young were better in every respect, there'd be no reason for the old. Our life span reflects our particular life strategy.

Cynthia Kenyon

This might be one way to start talking about differences between the early postmodern writers of the fifties and sixties and their contemporary descendants.

David Foster Wallace

In the fifties, no one wore beards. In Eisenhower's day, as in the time of the Founding Fathers, all chins were smooth, while during the Civil War, beards were as common as sepsis.

Donald Hall

Where Charlie Christian left off, Papoose started a new thing; he was an innovator of the guitar. The things he did during his recording career with Fats Domino in the Fifties and Sixties until the day he died was as much a part of the music of New Orleans as anybody else has had to offer.

Dr. John

People of my generation who became photographers in the late fifties, early sixties, there were no rewards in photography. There were no museum shows. Maybe MOMA would show something, or Chicago. There were no galleries. Nobody bought photographs.

Duane Michals

My dad was kind of a pool shark and had a Frank Sinatra, Dean Martin thing going on. I've always been fascinated by the fifties because of him. There was a hip, cool, anything-goes atmosphere back then, but looking good was still a priority.

Dylan McDermott

In those years of the Fifties, in London and New York, I lived, without knowing it, in a time when the profoundest changes were happening: when a radical alteration was getting ready to happen in the way a society saw young girls. And, as a consequence, in the way they saw themselves.

Eavan Boland

I think The Doors are one of the classic groups, and I think we're all tempted to feel like the time in which we grew up was somehow special, but I really do believe that there were two golden eras in music: The Forties and Fifties of big band, jazz and swing, and the Sixties and Seventies of rock. To me, they're really unparalleled.

Edgar Winter

I lived through the Fifties in the Midwest when everything that was happening - the repression of homosexuality, for instance, the demonization of the Left, the giggly, soporific ordinariness of adolescence, the stone-deafness to the social injustice all around us - seemed not only unobjectionable but also nonexistent.

Edmund White

The great triumph of the Sixties was to dramatize just how arbitrary and constructed the seeming normality of the Fifties had been. We rose up from our maple-wood twin beds and fell onto the great squishy, heated water bed of the Sixties.

Edmund White

The fifties - they seem to have taken place on a sunny afternoon that asked nothing of you except a drifting belief in the moment and its power to satisfy.

Elizabeth Hardwick

I know so many women in their fifties, sixties and seventies who delight in being on their own. It's amazing. They don't see any stigma attached to it. We don't need a man to prove our identity anymore.

Erica Jong

At 23 it was all about acting. Today it's getting my kids to school, making sure that they've done their homework. I'm in my fifties, and I'm turning into a square.

Gary Oldman

My alphabet book at Duddingston Primary, Edinburgh, began traditionally with 'a is for apple,' but when it came to 'g,' it was 'g is for gas globe.' This was in the late Fifties; there hadn't been gas globes for decades. The textbook must have been 30 or 40 years old!

Gavin Esler

Nobody ever said that growing old would be easy. Just having to hold the newspaper out in your forties and then hair growing out of unusual parts of your body in your fifties. It's tough on the ego.

Geoffrey Rush

Even though I loved the Fifties doo-wop, you couldn't hold on to it. You had to change, or you was gon' be antique real quick, like the Ink Spots. And then we were at Motown and you had the Rolling Stones, simple rock & roll became the new thing.

George Clinton

A lot of people like me, who've been around for years and years and years, only really lose it in their forties and fifties.

George Michael

The creation of Spoleto was a social experiment. Because I've always suffered guilt from being a Catholic, when I was in my fifties I felt a need of being needed.

Gian Carlo Menotti

Toward the middle and end of the Fifties, West European countries became somewhat more important as providers of aid to underdeveloped countries. It was partly due to the prodding of the United States that these countries, as they regained economic viability, should shoulder their share of the aid burden.

Gunnar Myrdal

These are the fifties, you know. The disgusting, posturing fifties.

Hannah Arendt

In the Fifties, Canvey was a top seaside place for a youngster - the famous Canvey Island Casino was full of slot machines and there were all the fairground rides, such as the dodgems, and a speedway track.

Harry Redknapp

Although the civil-rights movement did a lot to change how black life was dramatized on the American stage in the fifties and sixties, white composers and lyricists often still rely on familiar tropes when it comes to representing black women in musicals.

Hilton Als

I guess that's one of the things about growing up in the fifties - it never occurred to me that you wouldn't be at least as successful as your parents.

Hunter S. Thompson

Right around the end of the fifties, college students and young people in general, began to realize that this music was almost like a history of our country - this music contained the real history of the people of this country.

Jackson Browne

The Fifties and Sixties were years of unreal optimism about weather forecasting. Newspapers and magazines were filled with hope for weather science, not just for prediction but for modification and control. Two technologies were maturing together: the digital computer and the space satellite.

James Gleick